Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products and customers who are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with his or her query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available. The terms “call center” and “contact center” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, short messaging system (SMS), chat, web access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the terms “call” and “contact” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but include contacts made by email, fax, voice over Internet Protocol (IP) and any other suitable medium.
It is known to use a network of contact centers and to route contacts from one of those contact centers to another contact center in the network. For example, if one contact center is particularly busy, contacts can be routed to another less busy contact center. In this type of network of contact centers so called “network skillsets” also known as “workgroups” are often used. Agents with particular knowledge and ability can be members of a network skillset despite being associated with different contact centers in the network. For example, suppose there is a network skillset for agents who speak French. Agents can be allocated to that network skillset despite being located at different call centers, provided they speak French. Incoming contacts that require service by a French speaking agent can then be allocated to any of the agents in the French network skillset. A particular agent can be a member of more than one different network skillset.
As the volumes of traffic increase to call centers and the number of different agent skills increases the complexity of routing incoming contacts to the appropriate queues increases. In addition, there is a need to balance workload between not only the different contact centers in the network but also between agents in network skillsets.
Recently such load balancing between agents in a network skillset has become a particular problem. Not only is there a need to ensure efficient use of agent resources in the network skillset but increasingly labor law and union requirements mean that work must be shared between agents in an equitable manner.
As described in the following three US patent documents U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,546,452; 5,878,130; 5,848,143 a central controller is used to collect information from all contact centers in a network. That processor then receives all incoming contacts and routes those to the contact centers on the basis of the collected information and an optimisation algorithm or strategy. For example, these three patent documents describe seeking to route a contact to the highest skilled and longest available (i.e. longest inactive) agent in a workgroup. However, a problem with this approach is that there is no guarantee that the contact will be successfully routed to the longest inactive agent in the workgroup. If the chosen agent has in the meantime become active with another contact, the pending contact risks being dropped. This leads to customer dissatisfaction and potential loss of business. Alternatively, if the chosen agent is no longer inactive, the pending contact is routed to a different agent with the result that the required load balancing is not achieved. Another problem with the approach described in these three patent documents is that a central controller must be provided to which status information from all contact centers is sent. In addition, all incoming contacts need to be routed via the central controller. This is a complex approach which requires additional network equipment, increases traffic requirements in the network and is not robust because failures at the central controller affect the whole process.